Yet no, I could not believe it. No Christian woman would play so base a part. Señora de la Vega could have no interest in betraying me. She hated her savage husband too heartily to be the voluntary instrument of my destruction, and she was so utterly wretched that I pitied her from my soul. A creole of pure Spanish blood and noble family, bereft of her husband, forced to become the slave of a brutal Indian, and the constant associate of hardly less brutal women, painfully conscious of her degradation, hopeless of any amendment of her lot, poor Señora de la Vega's fate would have touched the hardest heart. And she had little children at home! My suspicions vanished even more quickly than they had been conceived, and before I reached my quarters I had decided that, come what might, the attempt should be made. The next question was how and when. Clearly, the sooner the better; but whether we had better set off at sunrise or sunset was open to doubt. By leaving at sunset we should be less easily followed; on the other hand, we should have greater difficulty in finding our way and be sooner missed. It was generally about sunset that Mamcuna sent for me, and I knew that at this time it would be well-nigh impossible for Señora de la Vega to leave Chimu's house without being observed and questioned, perhaps followed. So when we met as agreed, I told her that I had decided to make the attempt on the next morning, and asked her to be in a grove of plantains, hard by, an hour before dawn. I besought her, whatever she did, to be punctual; our lives depended on our stealing away before people were stirring. Meanwhile Gahra and I had laid our plans. He was to give out the night before that we were setting off early next morning on a hunting expedition. This would enable us, without exciting suspicion, to take a supply of provisions, arms, and a led horse (for carrying any game we might kill) and, as I hoped, give us a long start. For even when Señora de la Vega was missed nobody would suspect that she had gone with us. In the event--as we hoped, the improbable event--of our being overtaken or intercepted, Gahra and I were resolved not to be taken alive; but we had, unfortunately, no firearms; they were all lost in the snow-storm. Our only weapons were bows and arrows and machetes. I carried the former merely as a make-believe, to keep up my character as a hunter; for the same reason we took with us a brace of dogs. If it came to fighting I should have to put my trust in my _machete_, a long broad-bladed sword like a knife, formidable as a lethal weapon, yet chiefly used for clearing away brambles and cutting down trees. All went well at the beginning. We were up betimes and off with our horses before daylight. The braves on duty asked no questions, there was no reason why they should, and we passed through the village without meeting a soul.